Notebook

Notebook

Notebook

Keeping it real. Is there any modern phrase which so immediately makes one's Phoney Alarm go off big-time, with bells on? Sincerity has become very suspect over recent years, and with good reason – the search for authenticity has ruined more lives than crack, smack and sugar rolled together.

Notebook

Was there ever a bigger all-round phoney than the late Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, whose puddle-deep insights into the great (Martin Luther King), the good (Indira Gandhi) and the ghastly (her sleazebag of a husband and General de Gaulle) have just been released some 47 years after she confided to her pal Arthur Schlesinger and a trusty tape machine, soon after her husband's assassination?

Notebook

If you could put money on a word combo coming up empty on Google, one of the best bets would surely be "Dire Straits" and "hate crime". But apparently the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission has just amended a 15-year-old ruling that the Straits' "Money For Nothing" was unfit for broadcasting, due to three uses of the word "faggot".

I loathe London and visit it as little as I can. But on the the other hand, I find it hard to resist the sight of a self-deceiving tool making a spectacle of themselves. So I really do mean to make a special effort to visit the forthcoming V&A exhibition, "The House of Annie Lennox", which runs from next month until the end of February and to which admission is absolutely free. In such cash-strapped times, I foresee many a middle-class Mumsnetter using this outing in lieu of the traditional panto. It will certainly provide the usual prompts for audience debate and participation: "Annie Lennox is a hypocritical cow to criticise Rihanna for prancing around in her scanties when she regularly used to take her top off onstage back in the day!" "O no, she's not!" – "O yes, she is!" – and so on.

Goodness knows I'm a broad-minded broad, but I do yearn somewhat for a time when san-pro ads weren't being thrust down one's throat at every available oppo. I'm old enough to remember when the yowling Bodyform ads were considered a bit beyond the pale. Now you can't turn on the TV or open a magazine without being confronted with more periods than a Morse code manual.

On the island of Tanna in Vanuatu, the Prince Philip Movement is a religious sect followed by the Yaohnanen tribe, who believe that the Queen's ill-tempered, short-fused consort is a divine being. I've never got this, but over the past decade, observing the honour(s) given in this country to the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, I can definitely see how such misguided reverence comes about.

I suppose that as a card-carrying, man-mauling, moustache-twirling feminist, I should have dropped my blowtorch in sheer molten glee at the news this week that, over the past 30 years, men have upped their housework contribution some 60 per cent, according to a new survey from Oxford University. Instead, I thought, "Poor emasculated swine – now that's two genders rather than one who've been domesticated. Whoop de doo!"

Chavs really are the gifts that keep on giving – in their case, giving utterly worthless people the chance to lash out at an underprivileged group without feeling the hot hand of the law on their cold shoulder. The latest to point the finger is the actress Jane Horrocks, who spoke thus in a recent interview with the Radio Times: "There's always a set type of people doing their shopping according to the time or the day, whether it's pensioners holding everyone up or screeching kids. Or sometimes you can have rather a lot of chavs in, and that gets a bit scary."

In the Eighties when I was young and Godless, I penned a frankly filthy, and filthily frank, book called Ambition which went to the top of the paperback novel charts and made me a packet. It concerned the antics of one Susan Street, a young woman who was "almost clever and almost beautiful" and was determined to become the most powerful broad in Fleet Street. In the course of fulfilling this desire, Susan was not only prepared to sell her soul, but to slip it a Rophynol and bend it over the nearest sideboard in order to have it taken roughly from behind by any passing potentate, should this help her advance up the greasy pole.